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Saturday, June 13, 2015

Stadium construction: A political barometer

Politics is never divorced from sports, not even when it
comes to the construction of stadia. Budgets however have recently thwarted
plans in Turkey and Saudi Arabia to build a host of sporting facilities in a
bid to either win votes or curry favour with youth and other segments of the
population.

By contrast, Qatar despite the risk of posting its first budget
deficit in 15 years, is moving full steam ahead with the construction of eight
stadia in an effort to demonstrate that its business as usual notwithstanding
mounting threats to its hosting of the 2022 World Cup.

Budget restraints as a result of reduced economic growth and
spending on the recent parliamentary election campaigns has left Turkey strewn
with unfinished stadia and sporting complexes. Of the 20 stadium projects in
cities across the country, only two, including Galatasaray SK’s Turk Telekom
Arena in Istanbul have been completed.

The other is in Mersin, one of six stadia planned in predominantly
Kurdish south-eastern Turkey, the swing region in this month’s election that
for the first time brought a pro-Kurdish party into the Turkish parliament,
stopped the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) from winning an absolute
majority for the third time, and pre-empted Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plan to
amass further power by turning his office into an executive presidency.

NTV
Sport reported that most of the stadia projects were in various stages of
construction ranging from two to 45 percent completion. The stadia are part of
a $1.55 billion project announced in 2013 by Turkey's mass housing
administration (TOKI) that also involves the construction of 1,000 sports halls
and 431 sports facilities for education institutions.

John Konuk Blasing, the American-Turkish author of the thisisfootballislife
blog, reported that the majority of the projects had stalled because of lack of
funding or because contractors had gone bankrupt.

“In order to make it happen before the elections the
government directed construction firms to work fast, promising extra payments
after the elections. With money also needed to fund the campaign, however,
extra money for the construction projects dried up… Votes are all that could
ever be hoped to be won from such a strategy, certainly not real democracy
or–evidently–new stadiums,” Mr. Blasing wrote.

For very different reasons, politics has also delayed the
opening of Besiktas JK’s Vodafone Arena that was scheduled for mid-September.
While the Istanbul municipality ordered a halt to construction on the grounds
that it failed to meet the height limit of 34 meters, a fact disputed by the
club, many believe that the stoppage had more to do with the independence of
the club and its militant fans.

Besiktas is the only club to have funded the construction of
its stadium, making it less vulnerable to the whims of the government. Meanwhile,
a court is expected to rule on June 26 in the case of 35 members of Carsi, the
militant support group of Besiktas that played a key role in the 2013
anti-government protests on Istanbul’s Taksim square. The fans are accused of
having planned to topple the government and being members of an unidentified
terrorist organization.

Funding has also persuaded oil-rich Saudi Arabia to shelve
plans to build eleven stadia. Hit by reduced oil prices and the cost of waging
an ill-conceived war in Yemen, the government has reduced the number of planned
stadia to two, one in Dammam and the other in either Mecca or Medina.

Construction of the stadia was linked to the planned privatization
of the country’s top 14 teams that was unlikely to move them out of the control
of the ruling family and wealthy businessmen associated with it. The stadia
project had been put under the supervision of state oil company Aramco that
falls under the purview of King Salman’s powerful son, Prince Mohammed bin
Salman Abdulaziz Al Saud, who is also in charge of the Yemen campaign.

While higher than in the smaller Gulf states match
attendance in the soccer-crazy kingdom averages at 36 percent.

Low attendance is not a factor in the calculations of Qatar
as it monitors a US Department of Justice investigation of corruption in sport
governance that could expand to the Gulf state’s successful but controversial
bid for the 2022 World Cup and a Swiss enquiry into the awarding to Qatar as
well as Russia’s winning bid for the 2018 tournament.

One of the unidentified co-conspirators in the US
indictments of FIFA executives and soccer officials in the Americas is believed
to be Mohammed Bin Hammam, the disgraced Qatari national who was dismissed as
president of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and vice president of FIFA
and banned for life from involvement in professional soccer on corruption
charges.

A lengthy investigation by The Sunday times that involved
sifting through millions of documents believed to have come from AFC servers
put Mr. Bin Hammam at the centre of a multi-million dollar campaign to persuade
members of FIFA’s executive committee to vote in favour of Qatar. Mr. Bin
Hammam has denied the allegations while Qatar’s bid committee attempted to
portray its ties with the Qatari national as an arms’ length relationship.

The potential fallout of the latest FIFA scandal has
prompted Qatar to project an image of moving full steam ahead with its
preparations for the World Cup, including the construction of at least eight
stadia that would be dismantled after the tournament and shipped off to less
well-off countries.

Dependent for 90 percent on revenues and exports of its
energy wealth, Qatar is expected to next year experience its first budget
deficit in more than a decade as a result of lower oil prices. The International
Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted that Qatar could be in for budget deficits for
more than just a year.

“The recent events at FIFA will not impact on our
preparations for the 2022 FIFA World Cup,” Qatar’s Supreme Committee for
Delivery & Legacy said in a statement earlier this month. To make sure that
doesn’t happen, Qatar has hired four additional lobbying firms in Washington at
a cost of $1.9 million until the end of this month alone.

The move constitutes a realization that stadium construction
as part of a business as usual approach is unlikely to solve Qatar’s problems
that involve an image tarnished in part by its failure to act forcefully on
promised improvement of the conditions of migrant labour in the country.
Neither are recent libel suits against a right-wing French politician and a
former FIFA executive committee member who employed strong language to bolster
their criticism of the Gulf state. The establishment of a government
communications office may help provided it is backed up by the implementation
of promised reforms and policies.

The FIFA scandal “is going to make (the consultants’) work a
lot harder, they need to do something. At some point, you have to start pushing
your client (to be better). That’s the idea of public diplomacy. But sometimes
you can’t talk sense” into the client, The Hill, a newsletter covering Capitol
Hill, quoted a lobbying source as saying.

James M.
Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute
of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the
same title.

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile